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Britain’s biggest-ever sex survey’s bizarre finding that men have 70
per cent more heterosexual partners than women was defended by the survey’s
researchers at a seminar in London last week.

Margaret Thatcher vetoed state funding for the National Survey of Sexual
Attitudes and Lifestyles in 1989. But the survey of more than 19 000 people
was funded by charity, and some findings were reported last December. The
full study will be published next year.

The survey was criticised for finding that on average men reported having
2.5 heterosexual partners in the past five years while women said they had
only 1.5 partners. Logically, the numbers ought to be the same and the anomaly
cast doubt on how truthful people’s answers were.

However, researchers do not think people lied to them. ‘We believe everybody
has tried very hard to tell us the truth,’ said Jane Wadsworth, a statistician
at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, London.

The discrepancy is a problem for epidemiologists trying to predict the
spread of HIV, where the number of partners people have is a key factor
in how quickly the virus spreads.

One possible explanation for the discrepancy is that men exaggerate
the number of partners they have had while women discount some. However,
it seems likely that such misreporting is not intentional. When asked how
often they had sex in the past four weeks, men and women gave virtually
identical answers. The number of partners is the same (see Diagram) and
the frequency of sex is the same, with about 20 per cent of men and women
reporting that they had sex on more than 10 occasions.

Wadsworth says that as time goes by the discrepancy between men and
women grows. This suggests that men and women recall past encounters differently.
‘The quality of relationships is essential. There is not only what happens,
but how it is interpreted afterwards,’ says Wadsworth.

Two other factors could also help to explain the difference between
men and women: sex between men and female prostitutes and sex with people
who were not covered by the survey, such as those under 16 years old.

The survey did not ask women whether they had worked as prostitutes
and Wadsworth says it is unlikely that any women in the survey were prostitutes.
Some 6.7 per cent of men said they had paid for sex at least once in their
lives, but only 1.8 per cent said they had been to a prostitute in the
past five years. If prostitutes had been included in the survey, the average
number of sexual partners for women would have risen.

But prostitution is unlikely to be the whole story. To account for the
discrepancy, the men in the survey would have to have 2000 encounters with
prostitutes a year. But the men surveyed reported a lifetime total of only
3000 encounters.

Similarly, the results suggest that the effect of people in the survey
having sex with people not covered by the survey is small. Only small numbers
of men (1 per cent) and women (3 per cent) said that their last sexual experience
was with someone outside the age range of the study (16 to 59 years).

Wadsworth believes the true explanation for the discrepancy is likely
to lie in a combination of all three factors.